At the Electronic Communications Advisory Committee, we spent the majority of our time discussing a PLA wiki. Andrea Mercado , one of the co-managers of PLA blog, described her vision of a wiki that is like the Wikipedia of public libraries. And she said it’s okay for the wiki as a living organism to be in perpetual “Beta” — what a concept! So for the next year, the committee members will be working on getting feedback on the proposal at PLA Blog, developing guidelines and starting the construction of the framework of the wiki. Unfortunately, there are only four members as I know serving on this committee. We need more people!!! This is the best way to learn the ins-and-outs of PLA and the social software applications in the library land, not to mention to meet great people. Fill out the application and join us!

My next committee meeting was the Practical Applications of Technology in Public Libraries. We mainly discussed a program proposal on library user interface. It was felt that libraries have long ignored user’s experience with library interface and so have our ILS vendors. It’s time that we make the case to our ILS vendors or do something different on our own. Later we were joined by PLA’s Technology in Public Libraries Committee and LITA’s Public Library Technology Interest Group, a new group which appeared to have the same topics of interest as Tech Talk does.

The other interesting meeting is with the EBSCO Software Advisory Council. I really enjoyed brainstorming on innovative ideas of user interface with fellow librarians and software designers. Being the only public librarian at the table, I was able to give them a somewhat different perspective on how the propsed changes would be accepted by our staff and library users.